Ur Poems: Sarah V. Schweig

The first poem I ever loved was The Raven. Specifically, one line from the poem haunted me when I was young, and still does: “The silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain.”

Writers today might say that the line isn’t a very good one, now that it has become the fashion of writing workshops to balk at any overuse of adjectives. But in this line the words used to describe this minute detail suggest that the mind perceiving the rustling curtain (the mind that is obsessed by the loss of Lenore) is frantic to most accurately describe and interpret the fleeting details of his life.

A world that is indifferent to our sorrows and our ecstasies produces these details, but we can’t help but infuse them with our own meanings. These details are what the mind attaches itself to, are what move us, and—when we are privileged enough to even frantically attempt to record them, even as the wind dies and the sad uncertain rustling stops—they are what sustain us.

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SARAH V. SCHWEIG's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Western Humanities Review and Verse Daily. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia and Columbia University, and is also a 2010 Ruth Lilly Fellowship finalist. Her chapbook S is forthcoming through Dancing Girl Press. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.